By Jenny Erpenbeck, this was first published in German in 2021. Translated into English by Michael Hofmann, it won the International Booker Prize in 2024. I read the German version. The English translation is highly rated, but (according to Ross Benjamin anyway), "it reinvents Erpenbeck's prose style". I'm glad to have had it from the horse's mouth.

The story is bookended by a death and an investigation. Right at the beginning, we watch a woman called Katharina learning that a man called Hans has died. Six months later, Katharina is presented with two big boxes, and the bulk of the novel follows her as she works her way through the memories that emerge from the boxes and from her own records. A long way into this process, she learns: "Paper has the strange capacity to become a document. It also has the strange capacity to produce deception -- to detach one reality from the other, and establish a hierarchy of realities. And while you read this or that or the other, the other truth -- the unwritten truth -- lives on in some no-man's-land."

Back in this opening section, however, we also meet Kairos, the god of the lucky moment. He has a curl over his forehead, we're told, which is the only thing you can catch hold of him by. Once he goes past, you can see only the bald back of his skull, which is smooth, so there's nothing to catch onto. In which case, you've missed out. Was it, Katharina wonders, a lucky moment when, at the age of 19, she met Hans?

The story per se begins in East Berlin in 1986, when they first encounter each other, and rapidly fall in love. The documents Katharina receives range from 1986 to 1992. The Berlin Wall, by way of context, came down in November 1989 (when Erpenbeck, herself an erstwhile East German, was 22), and Germany was reunified in October 1990. It's a pivotal period of history that this relationship plays out against.

To recount their meeting, the narrator interleaves the sentences -- his point of view, her point of view. This technique is repeated at different points in the book. It's very effective. What he thinks. What she thinks. How divergent their views often are. How little we know of others, how little we can see into their skulls...



Hans is 34 years older than Katharina. (He was born in 1933, making him 53 when they meet. Their birth years add up to 100 -- 33+67 -- which they consider very significant.)

Erpenbeck has said that the age difference doesn't matter. It's who Hans is that matters. Right from the beginning, though, I felt that the different experiences and levels of power would, in themselves, be problematic, and would exacerbate any other negatives.

Hans is an author and broadcaster. Katharina was hardly born when his first book came out. He, on the other hand, learnt to walk under Hitler; he joined the Hitler Youth; his life was formed by the war. It's not that he's an unreformed rightist. Far from it. His family had ended up in the West (the section that would become the BRD), but at the age of 18, he deliberately chose to move back to the East (the DDR) after Germany was divided. It's to his father, if anything, that the old shreds of Nazism seem to cling (that father, whose academic career suffered only a fairly minor break in the course of the BRD's transition, is a bit of a placeholder for the failure of the western part of Germany to really uproot its Nazi past). Be that as it may, what Hans grew up with was radically different from what Katharina grew up with.

And right from the beginning, we see him educating her. She's not unwilling. She's interested in the arts, is keen to learn. But again, they're on a different plane. Not to mention the fact that he's married, with a son. From what Katharina can observe, it's a pretty empty marriage, but Hans shows no desire to leave it: "Without marriage, he wouldn't be who he is." When he meets Katharina, he already has another ongoing liason (not his first by any means -- Katharina's mother knows his reputation, and urges her daughter to be careful).

The complications of his family life mean that it's Hans who calls the shots. Where they can go. What they can do. Who they can be seen by. Inequality all the way.

I found it hard to put myself in Katharina's head, I have to say. Could she not see how screwed up this all is, I kept wondering, and how lacking in future. But she's besotted. Sees the two of them as one, thinks how odd it is that Hans knows her better than she knows herself...


Cologne, earlier this year. Katharina has family in this city, and at one point gets permission to visit them. Hans: "Cologne is a horrible place... What is Cologne Cathedral, compared with one of the Kremlin churches in Moscow?"

Things start to go wrong when Katharina, who is now studying theatre design, goes to Frankfurt (the an der Oder one, of course, not the am Main one) to do her practical. Hans, from the get-go, is jealous of Vadim, one of the guys she works with, and flounces off. There's a reconciliation, but it's totally on Hans's terms. Meanwhile, Hans's predilection for sadism is becoming more pronounced, and his tantrums only push Katharina further in Vadim's direction. But she's learning to become more secretive. Because Hans insists on reading her diary, she learns not to write everything down. What's not written didn't happen.

So everything slides inexorably down to that day in January 1988 when Katharina sleeps with Vadim. Unfortunately, she does commit this to paper. Not to the diary, of course, but to a loose piece of paper. Which, three weeks later, Hans inevitably finds...

It's at this point that the book becomes quite hard to read. We witness Hans's extended interrogation, designed for maximum humiliation, and Katharina's unbearable self-degradation. He insists on her writing a detailed self-examination. Yet she's "infinitely grateful" that he doesn't reject her... He practises a drip-by-drip kind of mental torture: "I can't stand the sight of your handwriting... You gave our music away to another person, sold it off... I don't know if I ever want to hear these pieces again. At least not with you." On her 21st birthday, he sets about her with a riding whip.

And he starts to record cassettes for her. Two sides, 30 minutes a side. A whole hour of bitter recriminations. He insists that she has to reply to all his points. And she does...

He refuses her presents. Goes on and on about how she has ruined everything. Says he no longer wants to do their planned trip to Moscow. Mucks about till the last minute, to keep her on tenterhooks.

They do go to Moscow, and it's an interval of relative calm. But then he's at it again. He tells her he went to Frankfurt, met Vadim, found out the relationship was much deeper and longer than she'd admitted. That's not true, she says. She begs him to believe her. Carries on pleading for 45 whole minutes. Until he admits he made the story up to test her...

More cassettes. (At this point, my marginal note reads: Not again... For heaven's sake, this guy is INSANE.)

"Tomorrow," he says, "we'll do what YOU want to do. And Katharina knows what he means. She knows what he wants her to want... Yes, she wants him to beat her... A long time ago this was a game. Now it's serious. Now reality has found itself. He hates her, and hates himself. She hates him, and hates herself. And both know this about the other." Katharina, who talks surprisingly openly about things to her parents, says she doesn't know what to do. Get him to see a therapist, says her dad.

It's the end of 1988. Hans goes to a therapist, but talks to him about Hoelderlin.

The affair drags on. Meanwhile, there are opposition rallies in churches, and when a lecturer talks about the "counter-revolution", Katharina walks out, with eight or nine others. People light candles in their windows, for solidarity. But as East Germany tilts, lurches, starts to sink, Katharina is there with her earphones on, listening to Hans's cassettes...

Eventually, after several attempts, and with a new Germany creating history around them, Katharina breaks free. Thank heavens. The third parting is the one that is for ever.


"The Gothic columns stand grey in the interior, like a frozen forest"

***

The story I've described so far is the story of a tormented, utterly toxic relationship. But layering into this is a political story, in which Hans loosely represents the East German state and Katharina its people. Like Hans, the DDR state apparatus provided culture, education, idealism, and a determinedly anti-fascist line, but it also dictated and manipulated and terrorized. As with Katharina, the people of the DDR were for a long time relatively content with what the state provided, but eventually needed to shake off the shackles, and break out.

Are they both, wonders Catherine Venner, simply products of their time? "Could his past play into his role as the aggressor in their relationship while Katharina’s socialist upbringing leaves her accepting of his increasing endeavors to control her?"

But even Hans-as-state seemed to be losing steam, perhaps realizing that you can't run on anti-fascism for ever. His father didn't reply after the war, when Hans accused him of ignoring the dead. So the younger man decided to join the part of Germany that he felt had taken the stronger stance against fascism -- he wouldn't ignore the dead. But he, too, has now started to wonder: What if, after 40 years, what he thought was an answer wasn't?

Erpenbeck has said in an interview: "Kairos is a slow process of how something meant as a kind of truth actually transforms into a relationship with lying at its center. As it was in the political history of the GDR. Ideas were received enthusiastically in the beginning, a new start after fascist times. Slowly, a certain vocabulary was forbidden, a certain exchange of opinions not allowed."


Hans mentions Heinrich Heine's poem, Germany: A Winter's Tale. There's a section on Cologne Cathedral: "But see! In the clear moonshine there, That mighty colossus of stone! He towers upward, so devilish black: The cathedral of Cologne." Heine's not a fan either. But Katharina and Hans reflect: "If Heine had been born a century later, he wouldn't have survived Germany. Not as a Jew, and not as a thinker"

***

The book's strongest contribution, for me, was its insight into how the DDR worked. I lived next door to it for a while, but I never experienced it (with the exception of a brief trip to East Berlin). When I first visited West Berlin, I was struck by the strangeness of hearing German voices on both sides of the border, and a little intimidated by the (very mild) questioning my West German companions encountered from the border guards. Sometimes, travelling by train in West Germany, I'd come across people who had family members "over there". It was a sad business, they'd say. And, of course, there was East German literature... Ah, that socialist realism... But Kairos offers us a much fuller picture.

1.

It gives us a detailed account of daily life. The cafes, the theatres, the exhibitions, the French soldiers from West Berlin who like to eat cheaply in the eastern part of the city... Many of the key cultural figures of the day are referenced. We hear of Trabis (of course), but also of a thing called a Laufmaschenexpress (a place where you could get the runs in your tights fixed). We look on as parcels from relatives in the BRD are unpacked: Nutella, washing powder, fine-mesh tights, jelly babies, coffee...

2.

Katharina has long been able to see over the Wall into the western part of the city. But her Cologne trip is her first opportunity to set foot there. She needs to apply for permission to go, and worries that bad reports from her employer might affect her application. But all is well, and she sets off. She's amazed to see hungry people, begging on the streets. Her Uncle Manfred says they're just lazy... And she's disconcerted by the blatant consumerism. "How do you like freedom?" her uncle asks her later. "The cathedral is nice," she says... "Here you can express your opinion," he continues. "I know," she says. She starts to wonder whether being able to fulfil your desires in the West just means that every desire becomes a desire for money.



3.

At least among some of the populace, there's a sense that they were betrayed by the BRD. This is Hans: "With the Paris Agreement of 1952, the West stopped dreaming of a united Germany. And, for better or for worse, so did the East... Adenauer sold the East for membership of NATO... The Russians... were even willing to permit a free and secret ballot in the whole of Germany, but there was one thing they wouldn't countenance: A unified Germany joining a military alliance aimed against the Soviet Union."

4.

The disappointed hopes of reunification are also very clearly articulated. East Germans wanted something different, but they didn't necessarily want to throw the entire socialist baby out with the authoritarian bathwater. Once everything collapses, it becomes clear that the citizens of the former DDR won't have much input into the decision-making. It's not a case of both bits of Germany deciding jointly on a constitution; it's just a case of the West's constitution being extended to the East.

And privatization looms: "If their institutions, and therefore their jobs, are to survive the autumn, they, the people concerned, would have to have a different past from the one they have, would have to be different from what they are, would have to become what they are not. All the things they would have to do they don't know, and don't want. It's not in their power." As Katharina's mother puts it: "First the West locked us out of technical progress for forty years with its Cocom list, ... and now we are accused of not being up to date." Hans is made redundant, along with 13,000 others from the TV and radio services of a state that no longer exists. There's a haunting account of the erstwhile employees being shown, one by one, into a room with a table and a telephone. They give their name, and they're told, over the phone by someone in Cologne, whether they're staying or not...

When Katharina and her friends embark on a frenzy of shoplifting in the newly opened West, they just feel as though they're getting some of their own back...

It is interesting that both Hans and Katharina feel destabilized by the new environment. As Benjamin remarks, the question of opportuneness or fortuitousness is implicitly raised in this contest too: "Was Kairos presiding over that moment? Or did he slip away, or get snatched away, from the grasp of the people who had sought to create a better future for themselves?"

4.

Erpenbeck gives us the impression that the ideological left-overs of the DDR state were dealt with more harshly than their Nazi equivalents had been.

In the Epilogue, we see Katharina consulting the newly opened Stasi files. It's interesting, she reflects, that the files are opened for East Germany, in a way they never were with West Germany's Nazi past.

But her investigations reveal that Hans, too, was for a long while an informer for the Stasi (and, in turn, was himself investigated). No wonder he knew the mind-games playbook so well... His case was archived on 13 May 1988: "Because of lack of prospects for cooperation." That was the day she had written to him, in reply to his third cassette: "I want you to know me, skin, hair, and everything." She hadn't known that she was his reflection, she thinks. "But he can neither see nor hear her, and can no longer give her any answer." And that's how the book ends.



***

Erpenbeck is a master of evoking something that is like nostalgia, but is not quite nostalgia because it is tinged by a critical edge. She's not pining for the "good old days"; she's just trying to set the record straight. Here, in 2014 (ie, well before Kairos), she explains some of this complicated emotion: "There was a lot of talk of freedom, but I didn’t know what to do with this concept, which was suddenly drifting about in all sorts of different sentences... Freedom wasn’t just a gift, it was something you paid for, and the price of freedom turned out to have been my entire life up till then... From this point on, my childhood became a museum exhibit... I loved this ugly, purportedly gray East Berlin that had been forgotten by all the world, this Berlin that was familiar to me and that now -- at least the part where I grew up -- no longer exists."

Benjamin contextualizes this stance: "Kairos belongs to a -- sometimes contentious -- contemporary shift in portrayals of the GDR." Its aim is not to whitewash what was reprehensible, but rather to present a more rounded picture. "How else are we to comprehend a story like that of Katharina and Hans?... [Kairos is] her most direct and sustained depiction of the historical rift she herself lived through and thus her most explicitly personal novel."

***

As though all this were not enough, there's also a mythical reading that adds yet further levels. I missed this completely (although I could see that all the art stuff was not there just by chance). There's lots of detail in Rebecca Gordon's two Substack articles, but in brief, she examines "the cosmological conflict between Hans’s mythology focusing on celestial, patriarchal deities and Katharina’s matricentric, chthonic one".



Personal, political, mythological -- and also readable. That's quite an act to pull off. It deserved its prize.